Sejm celebrates 100 years of the Universal Esperanto Association

The Sejm, Poland’s lower house, is today celebrating the centenary of the founding of the Universal Esperanto Association in 1908 by Swiss journalist Hector Hodler.Politicians have unilaterally hailed the continuation of the work started by Dr. Ludwik Zamenhof, a Polish opthalmologist and philologist who invented the language in 1887 in the north-eastern city of Białystok.

Parliamentarians declared in their bill that “in creating Esperanto [Dr. Zamenhof] wished to grant people the possibility to understand one another regardless of nationality, race, religion, or religious views.”

Esperanto is an international auxiliary language, and takes its name from the pseudonym originally taken by Zamenhof. According to some estimates, there are between 200 thousand and 2 million speakers of Esperanto around the world.